Tuned In
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Tonight, ABC airs annual favorite It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. (It’s paired with the midterm-timely special You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown, which at risk of heresy may be the superior cartoon.) The clip above is not from that show; it’s from The Charlie Brown and Snoopy …
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Tonight on DirecTV, Friday Night Lights returns for the last time (or the last time until the final season re-returns for its second run on NBC next year, for which no date has yet been set). I’m going to follow the same practice I did last year: because most Tuned Inlanders don’t have access to this run of episodes (which won’t be on …
Tuned In
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Think of it as a Mad Men DVD extra without the DVD. Tonight on PBS, Independent Lens debuts Art & Copy, a stylish documentary about the American ad business from midcentury forward that—like Don Draper’s career itself—traces the ascendancy of the copywriter in a business that used …
Tuned In
If I had unlimited time and it weren’t a dereliction of my duty as a TV critic, sometime I’d like to try taking in an entire season of In Treatment with the picture turned off: just sound, like a radio drama, or a podcast. It wouldn’t be the same, of course; In Treatment is a visual production just like any TV show (or stage play, which …
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to notice the rather startling shift in tone and intensity of last night’s Caprica. All season long, the show has been trying to find a way to pull in bigger Battlestar Galactica-like ratings, even as some sci-fi pundits have mused that the show isn’t electric enough for their tastes. Now, full …
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Here’s why I don’t post here every time a former Arrested Development star says, “We’re really close to making the movie!”: I’ve heard it too many times to believe it until I see it. Fox’s Running Wilde, likewise, is not the second coming of Arrested Development. Nor was Mitch Hurwitz’s Sit Down, Shut Up. And IFC’s The Increasingly …
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Tonight and Wednesday, PBS debuts Ken Burns’ The Tenth Inning, his four-hour sequel to Baseball. TIME’s Sean Gregory, who unlike me actually knows something about the sport, interviewed Burns and partner Lynn Novick about the doc:
TIME: The film deals with controversial figures like Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, yet we don’t hear
…
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Plane crashes are the new getting hit by lightning. That’s my takeaway from tonight’s debut of ABC’s No Ordinary Family, a light drama about a family of four who gain superpowers after their plane ditches into glowing water in the Amazon. My impressions of the show haven’t changed a lot since I Test Piloted it earlier this summer: it’s …
Tuned InUncategorized
It is very possible to make a good TV show about a bad TV show. On 30 Rock, for instance, TGS manages to stay on the air every year, but what we see of it—”Zis machine has too many farts in it! It’s going to explode!”—does not suggest a classic.
My Generation, premiering on ABC tonight, is about a bad documentary. A film crew …
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There are sitcoms you enjoy because you have such a good time watching them, and then there are the sitcoms you enjoy because the people involved clearly have such a good time making them. Community, which returns tonight on NBC, is an example of the latter. (The former too, but especially the latter.) The show, about a motley study …
Tuned InUncategorized
A confession: I liked Cavemen. Not “liked” in an ironic way. Not “thought it was not so terrible, considering how bad it could have been.” I thought that, despite a rough start, ABC’s much-mocked 2007 sitcom was actually a sharp and very funny comedy, even though it was roundly pooh-poohed for originating in a series of Geico …
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The running theme of this fall season has been that the broadcast networks have been focusing on simple, easy-to-follow shows, ceding more involved, serial shows to cable. (The couple of exceptions have had mixed results so far: The Event premiered well, Lone Star became a falling star.) That means a lot of new shows this season that …
Tuned InUncategorized
Say you create a sitcom that you’re really proud of. You like it, critics like it, it develops a loyal fan base. It has its run and goes off the air, maybe sooner than you’d have liked, sooner than your fans would have liked, before you’ve had a chance to really tell all the stories you’d have liked to tell.
What do you do? You can …
